About Voices and Votes: Democracy in America
The Museum Association of New York (MANY) is New York State’s representative to the Museum on Main Street (MoMS) program, an outreach program of the Smithsonian Institution Travel Exhibition Service that brings traveling exhibitions, educational resources, and programming across America to communities through local museums, historical societies, and other cultural venues.
Voices and Votes is adapted from the exhibition American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith currently on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. This traveling exhibition includes many of the same dynamic features as American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith such as: historical and contemporary photographs; educational and archival video; engaging multimedia interactives, and historical objects like campaign souvenirs, voter memorabilia, and protest material.
The Museum Association of New York (MANY) is New York State’s representative to the Museum on Main Street (MoMS) program, an outreach program of the Smithsonian Travel Exhibition Services that brings traveling exhibitions, educational resources, and programming across America to communities through local museums, historical societies, and other cultural venues.
Voices and Votes is adapted from the exhibition American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith currently on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. This traveling exhibition includes many of the same dynamic features as American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith such as: historical and contemporary photographs; educational and archival video; engaging multimedia interactives, and historical objects like campaign souvenirs, voter memorabilia, and protest material.
The 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is approaching and museums are looking for ways to engage their communities and make connections to the history of our nation and the hopes and principles it was founded on.
Learning about and understanding democracy is a process that takes place at the intersection of place, the individual, and the community. Museums occupy a space of public trust in their communities and in turn can provide safe spaces for discussion, an *Agora where objects of material culture, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, literature, and works of art can ground conversations in shared experiences.
Voices and Votes exhibition themes include:
- The principles and events that inspired the writers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
- The struggle for voting rights and equal participation in our democracy
- Freedoms and responsibilities of citizens
- The formal and informal processes of our political systems; music, performance, and visual arts as expressions of democracy
- Protest and actions beyond the ballot including civil rights movements and the struggles of historically marginalized people; and supporting new American citizens.
Exhibition Sites
The 12 museums that are participating in this Agora project will be adding to the greater conversation introduced by the Voices and Votes exhibition. Each museum will be creating a response exhibition that pulls items from their collection that reflects their community’s role in the development and advancement of Democracy in America. They will also be hosting programs as opportunities for the communities to further engage in the subject of Democracy.
The exhibition is part of Museum on Main Street, a unique collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), state humanities councils across the nation, and local host institutions. To learn more about “Voices and Votes” and other Museum on Main Street exhibitions, visit museumonmainstreet.org.
Support for MoMS has been provided by the U.S. Congress.
SITES has been sharing the wealth of Smithsonian collections and research programs with millions of people outside Washington, D.C., for more than 70 years. SITES connects Americans to their shared cultural heritage through a wide range of exhibitions about art, science and history, which are shown wherever people live, work. and play. For exhibition description and tour schedules, visit sites.si.edu.